As the world stares down the barrel of another recession so severe that it’s already being likened to the Great Depression, there are going to be casualties.
The world’s GDP is going to plummet.
SA’s already absurdly titled "negative growth" is going to go as low as temperatures in Alaska. Unemployment could spike from the current 30% to as much as 50%.
The unemployment figures coming out of the US are downright frightening, as are the lines at hastily set-up food centres, in the country that was the icon of success and achievement for much of the 20th century.
The Great Depression comparison is an apt one. The sudden crash in the past few weeks has been precipitous and swift. The rand has lost 34% against the dollar since January. As businesses face a force majeure-like event, it’s clear that many of them — of us — won’t survive.
The Covid-19 meteorite will be listed as the killer of so much of how we have lived and worked. Co-working spaces, gyms, yoga studios and shopping malls are now the kind of places we’re warned not to congregate in. And that’s just in the physical world. Our digital worlds are also much changed, as is the quantum of guilt associated with allowing your kids to watch more TV.
The Covid-19 meteorite will be listed as the killer of so much of how we have lived and worked
We are a shell-shocked nation with soldiers that harass and humiliate the very citizens they are deployed to protect. There have been lootings. It hasn’t been our finest moment.
Our government’s best-intentioned attempt to enforce self-isolation and slow the spread of Covid-19 infections has probably worked in the suburbs, but certainly not in the townships, where cramped communal living is the norm. Worse, people have no savings and no social cushion for the sudden-onset lockdown. Hunger is now the bigger fear.
In the midst of this excruciating and heartbreaking drama, there is still the ongoing melodrama that is SAA. It was fatally scuppered last year by a self-defeating labour strike that tipped the airline over into business rescue. The choice between rescuing this albatross (it needs another R10bn bailout) or feeding starving kids isn’t that hard an equation, even for the common sense-deprived unions.
What the world needs is a massive dose of common sense and some serious problem-solving, the kind of problem-solving that has made Africa a pioneer in what’s called frugal innovation or innovation out of necessity.
Frankly, things suck right now. Many of the old ways of doing things are being blown away, replaced by new ways we’re just feeling our way towards.
Perhaps I’m being optimistic about humanity’s ability to solve our way out of problems, but we’re good at that, as a nation and as a species. Evolution, in a way, is problem-solving; we have the ability to rise to the situations we find ourselves in. You always have to look up.
- Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff magazine (stuff.co.za)
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